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14 | Zoltan Simon
Still, political leaders cannot allow themselves to sink into pessimistic despair,
as they need to maintain and show a certain degree of optimism and self¬
confidence. Public intellectuals do not have the same constraints, and are free
to speak their mind. Their speculations over the future of Europe nurture a
proliferation of books, journal articles, and newspaper op-eds today. Many
of these present doomsday scenarios for the European Union.
The prominent Hungarian historian Ivan T. Berend presents himself,
born in 1930, as part of a generation whose personal experience was the
most devastating war in history, with mass murder and untold suffering,
the division of “two Europes” for half a century, and the threat of nuclear
confrontation, which made in his eyes European integration “the most
promising development that ever happened in millennial European history”
(Berend 2017, 1). Nevertheless, “the whole concept of the European
Community now came into question” and “for the first time in history ...
the question arises: can the European Union survive?” (Berend 2017, 3, 156;
see also Webber 2017).
In his book After Europe, Ivan Krastev gives a pessimistic answer to this
question by declaring himself as someone who believes that the disintegration
train has left Brussels’ station, and who fears this will doom the continent to
disarray and global irrelevance (Krastev 2017, 10). Also, Youngs acknowledges
the “uncomfortable possibility that the EU is in fact beyond any major degree
of qualitative reform’ (Youngs 2018, 5), adding that the cumulation of so
many different elements of its ongoing crisis suggests that there is “something
structurally amiss with European integration” (Youngs 2018, 15, emphasis
in the original).
Jan Zielonka shares the same doubts by stating that “the EU cannot be
consolidated: it ought to be reinvented” (Zielonka 2018, 113). However, he
also makes a distinction between European integration, as a concept, and
the European Union, as a polity, claiming that the EU may well be doomed,
but Europe and European integration certainly are not (Zielonka 2014, xiv).
Nevertheless, when he extends his scope to social and political dynamics
across Europe at large, the picture is rather gloomy:
Today, the entirety of Europe is in a state of confusion ... Europe’s citizens feel insecure
and angry. Their leaders look incompetent and dishonest. Their entrepreneurs seem
frantic and distressed. Political violence is on the rise ... There is no simple way back.
Europe has failed to adjust to enormous geopolitical, economic and technological
changes that have swept the continent over the past three decades ... The escalation
of emotions, myths, and ordinary lies left little space for reason, deliberation, and
conciliation. Another ‘valley of tears is therefore ahead of Europeans. (Zielonka 2018, x)
All these have also made EU scholars discover a long-ignored niche in
the body of existing research and literature. Notably, while the process of
European integration has been extensively analysed and explained, little